Gatekeeper

Chapter 3

Gail paused on the sidewalk, looking up at the four-story building before her. Wooden, peeling, sagging, and vast, it was one of Brattleboro's infamous dens-an eighty-year-old maze of low-income apartments. A doper's haven, a magnet for illegal activities, and a museum of odd and offensive odors, it was also cheap, downtown, and a short stroll from the town's primary twilight-world hangout, the Harmony parking lot, where the "denizens of the night"-real and imagined-surfaced as each day's light faded to darkness.

Which was why she'd chosen noon to visit her niece's last address. It was late enough to hope a few people might be awake, while early enough that they might not have ventured forth on their daily rounds.

This was a slightly skewed and paranoid vision of reality, of course. For all her canniness and experience-Gail had variously been a realtor, a selectwoman, a volunteer at the women's crisis center, and a prosecutor at the state attorney's office in town-she was also a woman born to privilege. Despite her support of many and sundry causes aimed at protecting and elevating society's disadvantaged, she wasn't one of them, and had an outsider's visceral lack of ease in their company. She hated this about herself, not surprisingly, seeing it as suppressed prejudice and unworthy of her ideals, but it remained. And it sat like a lump in her throat as she eyed the apartment building's dilapidated front door.

Taking a breath, she left the sidewalk and entered.

Immediately, this internal social debate came under stress. The place was dark, narrow, hot, and evil-smelling. She walked along a close-fitting hallway lined with punctured and torn drywall, stained and covered with graffiti, amid the muted murmurings of a dispossessed populace. There were shouts and arguments, small children's cries, the occasional thrumming of music muffled only by a succession of thin walls. Doors slammed somewhere overhead, footsteps could be heard echoing from afar, and yet she saw no one as she slowed to a stop, uncertain of which way to turn. Encased in an invisible turmoil of stirring humanity, she felt utterly alone.

She looked around, wondering how to proceed. Last night, before falling asleep together at Joe's small converted Green Street carriage house just a block away, the two of them had discussed what must have happened to Laurie. Gail had been furious, her frustration and guilt fueling a rage against almost everyone and everything she could think of, from drug dealers, to lousy prevention in the schools, to society in general. She'd also gotten angry at Joe for what she thought was a fatalistic, even complacent attitude. He'd pointed out that technically, Laurie had been committing a crime here and that there was little the police could have done in any case. They had enough on their plates without trying to discover what had pushed Laurie over the edge. Besides, he'd added, not unsympathetically, it was pretty obvious from her condition what her motives had been.

But Gail hadn't been receptive. She hadn't taken it out on him-she was practical enough to know that from his viewpoint he was right: The police were not in the business of probing some young woman's emotional or psychological problems. But Gail could be. For most of her adult life, she'd made such missions a basic tenet of who she was-a person who really did try to do something for society's semighostly population of the poor, the despairing, and the generally marginalized. And her commitment in this had usually involved total strangers, not her own niece. Guilt notwithstanding, it became clear to her that she'd have to be the one to pursue the cause of Laurie's plight. In the end, steadied by that resolve, she'd calmed down and let Joe get some sleep. And the following morning, she'd set out on her course.

However, now that she was here, she was suddenly at a loss. The apartments had no numbers, there was no directory or bank of mailboxes she could refer to. She began to suspect that the door she'd used hadn't even been the main entrance.

"Who're you?"

She turned to find a young girl peering at her from down the hallway, having appeared as silently as a ghost. She was a solid child, seemingly square and round both, with thick, straight black hair cut like a helmet around her head.

Gail smiled. "Hi. I'm looking for Laurie Davis's apartment. I'm her aunt."

"And you don't know where she lives?" The girl's face was almost stern.

Gail decided to play it straight. "I've never visited her here."

"Smart. This place is a dump."

Gail smiled slightly, caught off guard. "You live here long?"

"Long enough to know that much."

"Good point. You know Laurie?"

"I seen her around. Not to talk to, though. Where're you from?"

"Across town."

The girl nodded. "You look rich."

Gail was stumped for a response. She was rich, certainly relative to anyone here. And while it rarely came up in conversation, her money was a subject of some embarrassment to her. She'd earned a great deal of it, true enough, but she'd also been brought up in its comforts-a fact that had clung to her like a confusing mixed blessing.

Gail changed the subject, feeling disappointed in herself. "Could you take me to her apartment?"

The girl also seemed let down by her response, because she made a small frown, turned on her heel, and merely said, "Sure," before heading off in the opposite direction, quickly taking a right and vanishing from view.

Gail trotted along to catch up, following her small guide along a confusing variety of hallways, staircases, and right and left turns. Despite the time of day, the whole place was somber, but without the coolness associated with what felt like an underground colony. It brought to mind the complex rabbit warren of lore, but one baking in the sun, making Gail wonder if, despite the warm weather, the heat hadn't been left on. The air was stifling and stagnant the higher they climbed. By the time the girl stopped in front of a scarred and splintered hollow-core door, a trickle of sweat was coursing between Gail's shoulder blades and she was feeling slightly dizzy.

"This is it. Have fun," the girl said, and began walking away.

Gail wiped her forehead with her palm. "Wait. How do I get in? Is there a super or a maintenance man or someone with a key?"

The girl looked at her quizzically. "Why don't you knock?"

Gail felt stupid, and out of her depths. A woman who had never hesitated to go anywhere or try anything, who was comfortable pitting her brains and abilities against anyone she met, had now twice been brought up short by a twelve-year-old.

She laughed self-consciously, not bothering to explain. "Right. Stupid. I think I'll try to cool down a little first. Thanks for your help."

The girl eyed her skeptically, let a small but telling pause elapse before saying, "Okay," and then took the hint and disappeared down one of the tunnels she traveled like a veteran miner in search of diversion.

Which left Gail pretty much where she'd been when they'd met, even if she now knew which door was Laurie's.

She looked down at the scuffed wooden floor a moment, thinking again about why she was here. She'd told her sister on the phone it was to collect a few of Laurie's things, if only to have something familiar to put by her hospital bed. But the true reason stemmed from her conversation with Joe. Gail wanted to search the apartment, to find something explaining Laurie's descent, maybe even some compelling evidence she could bring to Joe. Gail wanted to set things right and ease her feeling of impotence with some action, all while knowing in her heart that she was basically running in place-right now literally working up a sweat for nothing.

She glanced at the door again, considering how unlikely it would be that this building had a maintenance man standing ready with a passkey. Yielding to impulse, she reached out and twisted the knob.

The door opened.

Surprised, Gail stepped inside. The room was small, square, fetid, and a total, absolute, war-torn pigsty.

In its middle stood a man. Staring at her.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

He was skinny, longhaired, and unshaven, wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Both his arms had tattoos and his gaunt face looked mean.

Gail had been raped years before in what she'd thought was the safety of her own home. She had worked hard to place that experience out of her way if never out of her mind, but now it came back like the release from a dam, in a hot and sickening tidal wave.

"I. .," she stammered. "Who are you?"

He took a step toward her. In his hand, he held a small canvas bag. "None of your fucking business."

She suddenly wondered if she hadn't made a terrible mistake-had in fact just walked into this man's home. She looked around in confusion. "I'm sorry. I thought this was Laurie Davis's apartment. A small girl led me here. I just assumed. ." Then she saw a framed photograph, leaning against the wall, of herself, Laurie, and Laurie's mother, linked arm in arm in happier days, laughing at the camera.

The sight of it cleared her head enough that she recognized other signs that this was a woman's bedroom.

"Tell me who you are or I'll call the police," she said more forcefully.

But he'd recognized the earlier fear, an expression he was apparently well acquainted with. He stepped up close to her, smiling, his eyes narrow and menacing. She could smell his breath when he spoke.

"I'm not gonna tell you shit, and you're not gonna call nobody."

"You're trespassing," she countered, hating the tremble in her voice.

He laughed. "And you're not?"

"No, I'm not. I'm family."

Their bodies were almost touching. She felt like a rope under tremendous strain, as if the slightest touch would be enough to make it burst apart.

But the man was as careful as he was threatening. He sidestepped around her and paused at the doorway. "I wouldn't brag about that, if I were you," he said, and disappeared.

Gail closed the door, locked it, leaned her back against its flimsy surface, and shut her eyes tight, fighting for calm.

* * *

Over a hundred miles away, Joe Gunther sat in a small conference room in the Department of Public Safety's headquarters in Waterbury Vermont, part of a large complex of old institutional brick buildings, the centerpiece of which had once been the sprawling state mental hospital-an association detractors still used with high humor.

The room was dark, dominated by a photographic slide that stuck to the far wall like a luminescent painting. It was the picture of a man hanging by his neck from a bridge, suspended like a sack of clothes over a tangle of gleaming railroad tracks.

"This was taken in Rutland this morning-the River Street Bridge," said a voice in the darkness. "The victim's name is James Hollowell, and the Rutland drug unit's ID'd him as a local street dealer, mostly crack and heroin."

"Any leads on who killed him?" Gunther asked.

The voice belonged to Bill Allard, Gunther's immediate boss and the chief of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. A career state trooper, he'd been tapped to head the VBI because of his people skills, his experience, and the fact that the Vermont State Police, housed just one floor below in this same building, hated the idea of the VBI-the brainchild of the current governor and a perceived threat to the VSP's preeminence in state law enforcement. It had been the commissioner of Public Safety's hope that appointing someone with Bill Allard's heritage and qualifications would soften the blow to his erstwhile agency's ego.

But the jury was still out.

Allard turned on a small light by his side to consult some notes. "Not specifically, but things have been brewing in Rutland long enough that this was basically waiting to happen."

Gunther thought back to last evening in Brattleboro, when Ron Klesczewski had said roughly the same thing about the storekeeper shooting Laurie Davis.

"A power struggle?" he asked.

"Nothing so clear-cut," Allard responded, hitting the key on his portable computer to bring up another slide of the same scene. "But the drug unit says things like this do happen, where a dealer tries screwing his supplier out of some product and gets reprimanded."

"I'd say that's being reprimanded," Gunther murmured, but he was beginning to wonder why he'd been asked up here. Dangling bodies from bridges was pretty exotic for Vermont, whose homicide rate usually hovered in or around single digits for a given year, but still, callously speaking, it did look like some lowlifes had merely done in one of their own.

"They must have some ideas," he suggested, extending his private musing.

"They have ideas, all right. Problem is, those ideas cross state lines."

"Holyoke?" Gunther asked. Holyoke, Massachusetts, had been a source of Vermont-bound drugs for several years, and he'd heard from the number crunchers that statistically Rutland had become a primary terminus, which was odd, given both its geographical isolation and its relatively small size when compared to Burlington. But the pipeline was undeniable and well known: Holyoke, Brattleboro, Rutland, with many small stops along the way.

As a result, Allard wasn't surprised by his insight. "Apparently, it's more than the usual scuttlebutt. Doesn't sound like much to me, but there's intel indicating someone's trying to organize the traffic way beyond its current level, which is pretty wide open. And I guess hanging someone from a bridge could qualify as a billboard advertisement. No one's tied it to Holyoke, of course, or to the Hollowell hanging, either, but that's the word from the street."

"Is the Rutland PD having problems handling this?" Gunther asked diplomatically. The commissioner and the governor notwithstanding, both Allard and Gunther saw the VBI as primarily a support service-a major-crimes team brought in only, when invited by the local law. The two politicians, naturally enough, had far grander visions of some look-alike, state-level FBI, but the two old cops knew the value of observing turf: You got ahead by getting along, and in the short, two-year history of their new agency, that philosophy had paid off handsomely. Even the state police were unofficially muttering that the VBI was courteous, competent, well manned, and so far, not headline hogs. Rumor had it that Governor Reynolds was most irritated by this self-effacement, which privately pleased Gunther very much.

And which therefore made Allard's response all the more disappointing.

"The PD's fine. It's Reynolds who's having a cow."

"Why?"

Allard hit the key on his computer again. This time the picture was of the inside of a dingy motel room and of a young girl's corpse lying on its side across a rumpled bed, a tourniquet around her arm and a needle on the floor near her dangling fingertips.

"Because of her. She's Sharon Lapierre, or was-granddaughter of Roger Lapierre, former Rutland Town selectman and party bigwig, who's also raised a pile of cash for Reynolds."

He stopped there, letting silence fill in the obvious.

"Ah," Gunther finally conceded, feeling suddenly tired. So much politics in this job-dealing with the public, the press, the municipal managers, and the statehouse folks, and with every fellow police agency in each and every investigation. This, however, was going to be above and beyond the usual. Jim Reynolds was running for reelection, as governors did every two years in this state, and he was facing a tough race. Through inference alone, Gunther already guessed the waters he was going to be asked to enter.

"He wants the VBI, his pet creation, to put things right," he suggested, "with appropriate press coverage."

Allard smiled humorlessly. "You're good. That's almost a direct quote. So far, the media's been so excited by the hanging that they haven't picked up on Sharon's death yet-we're sitting on it pretty tight-but it's not just about Miss Lapierre in any case. That would be too obvious, even for Reynolds. He's about to release a press statement saying the VBI will be tasked as of this week with eliminating the trafficking of heroin into the state of Vermont, so that he looks like he's doing more than just reacting to a pal's personal loss."

Gunther let out a short laugh. "God, I hope he didn't invoke the 'war' on drugs too. That would be way old news."

He pointed at the picture on the wall. "I suppose it goes without saying that she died of a heroin overdose."

"That's what it looks like. And the motel room was booked to James Hollowell."

That, Gunther found interesting, his brain instantly weighing what he'd heard so far about politicians, high-profit drugs, and the inkling of an organization making a grab for the local market. "No kidding? What's the story there?"

Allard leaned back in his chair and hit the lights, causing them both to blink in the sudden glare. "That's one of the things you're supposed to find out," he said.

Gunther made a face, despite his curiosity. "Rutland's not only got a good police department, but they share a building with an equally qualified sheriff. Not to mention that there's a state police barracks in town and an FBI substation. And isn't the Southern Vermont Drug Task Force already quote-unquote tasked with handling heroin traffic? Seems like all that would make our showing up a little redundant-at best. My guess is the reception would be frigid, and I'm not sure I'd fault any of them."

Allard shifted in his chair. "This isn't a debate, Joe. It's a done deal. I put in my two cents from the start, but basically we're screwed."

"You know we're about to flush two years' worth of good PR down the drain."

They both stared at the pale ghost of the slide that Allard hadn't yet extinguished.

"You said the governor was about to issue his statement," Gunther finally said, the company man not just yielding to the inevitable but transforming it instead into a challenge to be met. "How much time do we have?"

"Three days, maybe a little more. He's knee-deep in prior campaign commitments right now, he wants to be brought up to speed before he talks to the media, and like I said, he wants some time to elapse between her death and his announcement. So, we've got a little breathing room. But he is hot to trot and he's been known to shoot his mouth off prematurely. Plus, we don't know what'll happen when the press discovers Sharon. Why do you ask?"

Gunther drummed the tabletop with his fingertips. "Because the only way we can get this to work is if we lock something in before he makes it official. If by the time of the announcement we're seen by the other agencies as having something tangible to bring to the table, then we might be treated as something more than an uninvited guest. Right now both the Rutland PD drug unit and the task force have legitimate claim, a track record of working together and solid, preexisting intelligence sources. We'll need something to top all that, or we'll end up looking like the weird political creation we've worked so hard not to be. I'm not so worried about the other cops-they'll just ignore us if they want. It's the governor's opponents that could put the limelight on us. After all the effort we've put into this organization, I'd hate for us to be treated like a political football. Our people deserve better than that. And they should expect us to watch their backs."

Bill Allard looked a little taken aback by his vehemence. "I don't argue with you, Joe. But what can you do?"

Gunther stood up. "Scramble. And you can help. Get the governor to keep his mouth shut till I give the thumbs-up. Tell him he'll be sinking us before we leave shore and making himself look like a jerk otherwise. And make sure that when the time does come, he does two crucial things: One, he doesn't single us out like he's planning to. He can identify us at that press conference, but only in a laundry list that includes Rutland and the state police and whoever else I can think of by then. And two, he cannot say we or anyone else are going to stop heroin from coming into the state. If he does, he'll lose the election, and I'll be happy to explain to the media why. If he has to say something bombastic, have him stick to Rutland itself-as in 'a major effort will be made to curb the import of heroin there'. . or something like that."

Bill Allard nodded once. "I'll do what I can."